


Signs

by WahlBuilder



Series: Languages of Love [15]
Category: Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autistic Technomancers, Brotherly Bonding, Gen, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Sign Language, Technomantic Culture, cultures plural, or rather, twenty headcanons in a trench coat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22238971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: Sean is practicing Auroran electro-signing with Roy.
Relationships: Sean Mancer & Roy
Series: Languages of Love [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1277777
Kudos: 5





	Signs

Sparks dance on Sean’s bare fingers. Roy isn’t distracted by it as he sometimes is by other things, usually sounds, as though falling into a canyon, blind to anything else,—but it’s close. Sean’s fingers are covered in many faint scars, and veins stand out too starkly, and the skin is almost translucent, too thin, every shift of bone clearly visible—no wonder he prefers to keep his hands covered.

Roy always pays attention to hands—he usually has more problem with paying attention to eyes or faces.

Sean isn’t exactly good at languages, and harbours, Roy feels, a smattering of shame for that. Not just for not being exceptionally good at something, but specifically for that, considering that he’s so good at using words. But it’s only a smattering, intense but small—probably, Roy assumes, because of Melvin. Sean actually _wants_ to not be good at something his older brother is good at.

But this is a language that is only theirs—that means, only by and for Technomancers, although Roy sees how it has seeped into Noctian sign languages, and Dandolo has _something_ flare in the right ways when he uses it. Dandolo does understand electro-signing.

Roy watches Sean slip, mixing in a few words that are from the Ophirian Technomantic SL, but Roy doesn’t stop him and doesn’t try to correct him.

It is a story about a tiny magpie Zachariah made for Sean time ago (and Sean has kept it, of course), but Sean doesn’t know the sign for magpie, and he signed a long explanation for it at first, but then slipped into ‘rogue-bird’ for it, which is a little confusing in the course of this tale, because Zachariah’s electro-signing name they’ve settled upon is ‘Rogue-Heart’ and Sean forgets the ‘heart’ sign, so it results in ‘Rogue who made rogue-bird’ and similar things. Roy tries to hide a smirk.

It’s a good tale, however, a fond memory. Sean _is_ a magpie, holding his treasures, his ‘shinies’ close to his chest, lest they are snatched away. Roy doubts Sean will ever feel he can leave them at places, certain they will still be in those places next day. Sean has instincts of someone who lived in extreme poverty.

Sean stops abruptly and drops his hands with a sigh. ‘This is so physically exhausting.’

Roy leans back, turns his head away. He doesn’t want to look at Sean. ‘Probably.’

He could have said that he doesn’t know why he even started teaching Sean back when he revived Sean and dragged him onto a train—but it would be a lie. He knows why. It’s… vanity and loneliness.

Electro-signing is his first language. It’s the language he reverts to when he’s too tired to talk, when he’s too agitated, when he’s slipping. It’s the language he _understands_ when he’s… not exactly himself. Tenacity understands it and can sign, Innocence is also learning it—but without electricity, it’s a lot of guess-work, and a lot of shades of meaning is lost—and Roy _can’t_ read faces.

Signing for Ophirian Technomancers is a different matter: they use their own sign dialect of the ASL met primarily in the Slums, and they do use electricity—but those things are separate. Electricity is used for gestures-without-gestures—a sort of language of its own, of course, but not a proper one.

Roy feels that there is such an uncrossable chasm between himself and the world. He can’t even understand what they say, though he knows too many languages to count properly.

He cannot fully shake off the culture he grew up in—but he doesn’t fully belong there either. He is an island, an orphan star hurtling through the abyss.

He is angry with himself for being unable to cut himself loose, unable to not want to belong, to find his own shape, his tongue, his people, his place.

He looks at Sean. They can’t understand each other—and it’s not a tragedy, they simply _can’t_. They are built differently, wired differently.

Sean lifts his hands and signs.

Roy tilts his head. ‘You used the wrong “love”. And the wrong “brother”.’

Sean sighs—too loudly for it to be anything but theatrics. ‘Remind me of the right ones, then.’


End file.
